Some Notes and a New Feature.

 

I'm Going to Challenge You to A Duel.

 

I decided on a new segment for the blog.  Thought we were in need of a bit of fresh air.  It’s no secret that I am a big fan of Sporcle, the website that has quizzes on about any subject you can think of.  Updated daily, it’s a nice way to waste a few minutes and test your mental prowess across a number of fields.  Personally, my favorite part of the quiz is seeing the stats after finishing.  I like to rank highly, and then I speculate about how many of the people above me are heartless cheaters.  Usually this number is 100 less my score on the quiz.  I thought it might be entertaining to select a daily quiz, post my score, and then you all can go and try to best me.  I wouldn’t get your hopes up, but stranger things have happened.  If you win, feel free to come back and gloat.  In the more likely case that you don’t measure up, better luck next time.  The first Sporcle quiz of the day:

Words With an “x” in the Middle.  Category:  Words and Stuff.  My Score: 16 out of 20.  Not thrilled with this performance, but I’ll take a gentleman’s B-minus any time.

Other Things:

I heard a commercial for guys who have those dreaded “problems in the bedroom,” today.  It wasn’t Viagra or any name brand product, but a doctor who could help you if all other options had failed.  He promised positive results on your first visit, then he emphasized, “in my office.”  I wasn’t paying close attention, but then I thought about the phrasing and wondered what that meant?  Does he go into the back room, mix up a potion and then you sit there with him playing pinochle until you feel a tingle?  Very odd commercial.

Former Eagle Kyle Eckel posted on his Facebook page that he had heard a rumor Andy Reid was going to be replaced by Jon Gruden.  I guess since Eckel once played, people gave merit to this rumor and it completely exploded on the internet to the point the Eagles actually had to make a denial.  Eckel also came out and said he had no inside information (shock).  My question becomes, if you could start an outrageous internet rumor in the world of sports, what would it be?  I think mine would be “Eli Manning was born a woman.”

Mark Wilson (the golfer) is on fire.  Before this year I was more familiar with Marc Wilson the worst video game QB of all-time, and a historical DA of the week.  Mark Wilson the golfer won his 2nd PGA tournament of the year on Monday in a playoff at the weather delayed Phoenix Open.  He’s over 2 million in earnings for the year, and is way, way better than Tiger Woods right now.  I don’t think the golf world is ready for Mark Wilson to be a top-10 player in the World, but he wins a few more events the most common response to the words, “Mark Wilson,” will no longer be, who?

Lastly, I’d like to say a melancholy farewell to Sierra Nevada ESB.  I had only recently discovered this beer (2009?), and I now I find that it has been replaced in Sierra’s seasonal rotation by Glissade, a golden bock.  I have heard and read only great things about Glissade, and I’ll be looking forward to trying it, but just a few weeks ago I was talking about how I was looking forward to the ESB only to confirm its demise this morning.  A harsh, harsh reality.  I can’t speak in jargon about beer flavors, but the ESB was pretty dang good.  Guess I’ll have to get over it, or perhaps draft a very harshly worded letter to Sierra Nevada in which I suggest they conform their brewing practices to my personal tastes.

Happy Bachelor Monday everyone….talk to you later.

 

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Funniest Sitcom Women Ever.

 

Not on the List.

 

I guess Mrs. Garrett gets consideration, but really I wanted to do this post because it was hard for me to think of a solid list here.  I was watching an old re-run and I saw the character who I have at #1, and it just made me think about who else I would put on the list.  The names didn’t come flooding into my mind like you might expect after a life of watching TV like mine.  If you casually Google a list of top sitcom characters of all-time you’ll probably only see a few women in the top 2o or 30 and those are characters that are before my time…Lucille Ball, Carla from Cheers, maybe Laverne or Shirley?  I didn’t watch those shows.  For me, the female sitcom stars are too few and far between.  A top five, with apologies to Tina Fey, who I honestly liked better on SNL.

5.  Marge Simpson.  I haven’t seen an episode of the Simpsons in years, but if you just go from about season 3 to season 9, that’s a decent run for a normal sitcom.  I think in many ways the Simpsons has been carried through the years by their supporting characters.  Homer was classic, but eventually his act wears a little thin.  Marge is the ultimate complimentary character.  She puts up with everything, has great hair, and when they let her shine, she really can step up.  Sample Marge Quote:  ”Homer, I don’t want to leave Springfield.  I dug myself into a happy little rut here, and I don’t feel like hoisting myself out of it.”

4.  Grace from Will and Grace.  I’ve occasionally been given a hard time about liking Will & Grace.  To those people I kindly responded that they were morons for not watching the show.  It was damn funny.  Especially for the first four seasons or so.  There are two really good female characters in this one.   Grace and Karen.  Karen, I enjoyed, but it was a little too much shtick to make the list.  Grace I like so much, because she’s a complete hot mess.  She just never quite gets it together, and yet she completely owns it.  Very endearing.  Sample Grace quote, “Today I’m handing out lollipops and ass whoopings, and right now I’m all out of lollipops.”

3.  Kelly from the Office.  I think Kelly might be my favorite female character on TV right now.  Leslie Knope is making a nice charge, but Kelly is just fantastic.  I think she’s the only character on The Office that is still just as funny as she was at the start of the show.  I think her role is just small enough that they don’t have to keep reinventing her.  She just sticks to what she does best, which is stealing a couple of minutes per episode.  Favorite Kelly quote:  ”Darryl Philbin is the most complicated man I’ve ever met.  I mean, who says exactly what they are thinking?  What kind of game is that?”

2. Roseanne.  Roseanne was such a good show when it first came on.  And, it paved the way for a lot of women to get their own shows, or to take on better roles, but for whatever reason I don’t think anyone got in Roseanne’s ballpark.  There were some unique aspects to this show.  First, Roseanne wasn’t rich and she wasn’t some beauty queen posing as a housewife.  You think of the 80s sitcoms…Who’s the Boss?  Growing Pains, Cosby Show, Family Ties.  It’s all good-looking people in relatively well off families.  Roseanne had none of that, so it had to be very funny, and it was.  Occasionally Roseanne would yell at the kids on the show, and it would remind my sister and I of something our mother said to us, and that entertained us to no end.  Roseanne quote, “The only thing I don’t like about fat is that it doesn’t have sugar in it.”

1. Elaine.  Elaine dominates this category for me.  It’s not even a close race.  I still watch Seinfeld re-runs, and I think Elaine grows on me more and more.  There are so many things I like about Elaine, but probably my favorite is how she can terrorize the male characters, most notably George.  I love the disdain she has for George, and how you can almost sense the self-loathing that arises when she realizes these are the people she hangs out with.  I think the Soup Nazi episode, probably the best in the history of the show, also sums up Elaine the best.  In the end she leaves the Soup Nazi as a broken man, and that’s Elaine…spiteful and hilarious.  She had her own catch phrase, “yadda, yadda, yadda,” she was the best.  Elaine Quote:  ”I’m not a lesbian.  I hate men, but I’m not a lesbian.”

 

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Finally Won A Dang Box Pool.

 

The Outcome of the Game Becomes Secondary.

 

Seldom has there been a Super Bowl I dominated like this one.  Picked the winner.  Jordy Nelson.  The over.  How many ways was I going to bend this game over my knee?  I added a little financial supplement to a quite Super Sunday with a little low stakes box pool victory.  You may remember me lamenting last week about my lack of success in such pools, but this should give hope to all the mushes out there.  The Steelers’ 2-point conversion in the 4th quarter, Green Bay’s last FG, it really all came together.  The game itself was close without being overly dramatic?  Or, did I not get properly invested?  Compared to some of the close finishes of recent Super Bowls, this one felt less dire, but I’m sure for Packers fans the outcome was very satisfying.  Some things…

If there is a player out there who doesn’t want a lockout a little more than all the others, it might be Aaron Rodgers. Rodgers catapulted himself into the stratosphere Sunday night with a performance that will make him the new heir apparent to the Manning/Brady debate.  It was a month’s worth of great quarterback play for Rodgers who has only been Green Bay’s starter for 3 seasons.  Considering the loss of Jerimichael Finley and their banged up running game, there is no reason to think the Packers will be slipping next season (that is if the boys decide to get a deal done). Rodgers is accurate, mobile and at times it looks like he engineers TD drives at will.  He clearly outplayed Ben Roethlisberger on Sunday, and in his five career playoff games, his one loss came when his defense gave up half a hundred.

Speaking of Roethlisberger, it was a performance that sent him crashing down the historical ranks.  It would have been painful to stomach, but had Roethlisberger won this Super Bowl, we would have started hearing things like, “Future Hall of Famer,” he would have been in the all-time QB discussion, and I just don’t think many fans are comfortable with that. And, let’s be honest, the guy has left a bad taste in the mouth of many fans.  The Roethlisberger hate is still out there, and it’s still palpable.  Big Ben wasn’t terrible like he was in his Super Bowl against Seattle, but he buried the Steelers with turnovers early, and couldn’t complete a comeback in the end.  For now, Big Ben is safely back among the realm of very good, but not great quarterbacks.

It seems simple to boil down the game to just turnovers, but where else do you want to go to find the difference in this one?  You could question the 52-yd field attempt for Suisham (his mom didn’t think that was going through), but aside from the turnovers the teams played a similar game.  Mendenhall’s fumble derailed some effective running he had been doing in the game, and Big Ben’s pick-6 was a bit of a bad break, but the throw looked like it was going to be ill-advised at best.  I think the Packers took advantage, didn’t make mistakes, and even if they might have let up a bit once they hit 28-17, they controlled the game from start to finish.  At the end when they needed points, they scored.  When they needed a stop, they got the stop.

Commercial Round-Up:  It’s hard to keep the focus for the entire game these days.  It’s a long day, and I have to say that there were probably some good commercials in the 2nd half that I might have missed out on.  That said, I thought the creativity was a bit lacking.  Don Draper would have been horrified.  Not much was grabbing me early on.  Doritos was showing a lot of heart, but mostly landing on creepy.  In the end, some of the best I saw were…

The Chevy Truck Lassie theme.  Nothing groundbreaking here,  but mildly creative and identifiable.  Also, this was the first decent commercial after a solid 1/2 hour of complete junk.  My standards were incredibly low at this point.

I thought the Bridgestone “Reply All” ad was a good one.  It’s something probably everyone has done, sent the accidental email.  And, for Bridgestone to piggyback onto that theme for tires was unexpected.  This was the first one all night where I chuckled.

I liked the one where Apple users were depicted as these drone type humans walking around in all white with their ear buds in.  I thought that was some good backlash at Apple.  They are so prominent now that they really can’t claim any counter-culture status.  Also, I have no issue with Apple, but people who are obsessed with it are a little much.

I saw Roseanne getting bundled?  That was probably funny.

My favorite commercial, though, was the monkey drivers for Career Builder.  Monkeys are funny.  Bad parking jobs in parking lots are a pet peeve of mine so I was nodding my head vigorously for this one.  Their was some real good dialog from the guy trapped in his car.  Of what I saw, it was easily my favorite.

So, that’s your NFL season.  Hope everyone got their money’s worth.  I can honestly say I am ready to move onto something else.  I hope it comes back as scheduled this fall, but for now I am ready to put the Fox pregame crew to bed, and get Joe Buck juiced up for some baseball games.

 

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